1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, systems, and products for modifying a grammar of a hierarchical multimodal menu.
2. Description of Related Art
User interaction with applications running on small devices through a keyboard or stylus has become increasingly limited and cumbersome as those devices have become increasingly smaller. In particular, small handheld devices like mobile phones and PDAs serve many functions and contain sufficient processing power to support user interaction through other modes, such as multimodal access. Devices which support multimodal access combine multiple user input modes or channels in the same interaction allowing a user to interact with the applications on the device simultaneously through multiple input modes or channels. The methods of input include speech recognition, keyboard, touch screen, stylus, mouse, handwriting, and others. Multimodal input often makes using a small device easier.
A multimodal application is an application capable of receiving multimodal input and interacting with users through multimodal output. Such multimodal applications typically support multimodal interaction through hierarchical menus that may be speech driven. Such speech driven menus have a grammar that is subdivided to provide a limited grammar at each tier of the hierarchical menu. Such subdivided limited grammars are assigned to a particular tier in the hierarchical menu that corresponds to the menu choices presented to a user at that tier. A user may navigate each tier of the menu by invoking speech commands in the limited subdivided grammars of that tier that correspond to the menu choices before the user. Only the limited grammars corresponding to the user's current menu choices are typically enabled and therefore available as speech commands for the user. These limited subdivided grammars can typically support more keywords and therefore are often underutilized. Such grammars are typically static despite the frequency a user may invoke a particular speech command. Such grammars therefore often require a user to repeatedly navigate deeper into the hierarchical menu than would otherwise be necessary. There is therefore an ongoing need for modifying grammars of hierarchical multimodal menus in dependence upon speech command frequency.